The Maryland home of Mary Surratt — the first woman executed by the U.S. federal government — where John Wilkes Booth stopped the night he shot President Lincoln
9118 Brandywine Road, Clinton, MD 20735
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
Modest admission fee for guided tours. See surrattmuseum.org for current rates and tour schedules.
Access
Limited Access
1852 two-story frame house; stairs required for upper-floor access
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1852 · Site Where Booth Collected Weapons Night of Lincoln Assassination · Home of Mary Surratt — First Woman Executed by U.S. Federal Government · Confederate Safe House and Courier Way Station · National Register of Historic Places
Mary Surratt and her husband John built the two-story frame house and tavern on Brandywine Road in 1852. The property served the rural Prince George's County community as a polling place, post office, and tavern, with the Surratt family running it as a Confederate sympathizer household during the Civil War. After John Surratt's death in 1862, Mary took over management of the property, which by then had become a way station for Confederate couriers and operatives moving between Virginia and Washington.
In early 1865, the conspiracy to capture — and later to assassinate — President Abraham Lincoln coalesced around Mary Surratt's Washington DC boardinghouse. Her son John Surratt Jr. was an active Confederate courier, and her boardinghouse served as a meeting place for the conspirators including John Wilkes Booth. The plan developed into an assassination plot, and on the evening of April 14, 1865, Booth stopped at the Surrattsville property — as the Clinton area was then known — to collect a carbine rifle and field glasses that had been left there in preparation for a post-assassination escape.
Booth shot Lincoln at Ford's Theatre that same night. Lincoln died the following morning. Mary Surratt was arrested four days later. At trial before a military tribunal, she was convicted of conspiracy and sentenced to death. On July 7, 1865, she was hanged at the Washington Arsenal alongside Lewis Powell, David Herold, and George Atzerodt — becoming the first woman executed by the United States federal government.
The house was purchased by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission in 1965 and opened as a public museum in 1976. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The museum maintains period furnishings and interpretation focused on the assassination conspiracy and its aftermath.
Sources
The Surratt House does not promote itself as a haunted venue — it is operated as a serious historic site by a county parks agency. Yet the staff and volunteers who spend significant time in the 1852 structure have accumulated a handful of persistent accounts.
The tavern room on the ground floor — where the conspirators met, and where Booth's associate David Herold picked up the weapons on the night of April 14 — produces the most frequent reports. Docents describe cold drafts that appear without explanation and, on occasion, the sound of chairs scraping on the wood floor when the room is empty. Footsteps on the upper stairs are the most commonly reported phenomenon, typically heard in the late afternoon when tours have ended.
Historians of the assassination period have noted that Mary Surratt's guilt remains genuinely contested. She was convicted on testimony from John Lloyd, the tavern's tenant, and Louis Weichmann, a boarder at her Washington house. Several of the military tribunal judges later expressed doubt about the death sentence. Her son John Surratt Jr., who was a documented Confederate operative, fled to Europe and was not tried until 1867, when he was acquitted. Whether the presence reported at the house is hers is a question the museum staff leave open.
Notable Entities
Volunteer docents lead tours of the 1852 farmhouse and tavern, covering the building's history as a Confederate safe house, Mary Surratt's boardinghouse operation in Washington DC, her role in the Lincoln assassination conspiracy, and her execution. Artifacts include period furnishings and items related to the Booth escape route.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
Waldorf, MD
On April 15, 1865 — the morning after Lincoln's assassination — John Wilkes Booth and David Herold arrived at Dr. Samuel Mudd's Charles County farmhouse seeking treatment for Booth's leg, broken when he jumped from the presidential box at Ford's Theatre. Mudd set the fracture and the fugitives departed that afternoon. Mudd was arrested days later, tried by a military tribunal, and sentenced to life imprisonment at Fort Jefferson in Florida's Dry Tortugas. He was released in 1869 after helping contain a yellow fever epidemic at the prison.
Springfield, OH
Daniel Hertzler built his Pennsylvania-style bank house on this Clark County property around 1854. On October 10, 1867, robbers who suspected Hertzler was hiding a large cash reserve broke into the farmhouse and shot him dead. Two suspects were arrested and then escaped jail; neither was ever recaptured. The unsolved murder left the property in legal limbo until it was eventually acquired as part of what is now George Rogers Clark Park.
Salisbury, MD
The Wicomico County Courthouse on North Division Street in downtown Salisbury was built in 1878 and remains the county's seat of justice. It anchors the city's historic core and, with the site of an earlier jail nearby, has become a fixture on Salisbury's downtown ghost walks.